Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Report (Updated: September 2020).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

September 2020

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Helped 787,817 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

F5 Advanced WAF

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Man...

Average Rating

8.2

Number of Reviews

117

Ranking in other categories

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2024, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 15.0%, up from 11.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is 1.9%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Unique Categories:

No other categories found

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

13.1%

Featured Reviews

Phani Sundar Mandarapu

Enterprise Architect at Collins Aerospace

Apr 3, 2024

Efficiently protect web servers exposed to the external network and robust stability

Primarily, the Advanced WAF sits behind our network perimeter. It centralizes traffic flow to our network, filters requests, and identifies any potential threats It helps us detect threats or malicious requests coming into the network, protecting it from being hacked. It helps guard against…

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Kuber Shukla

Senior Security Specialist at Tech Mahindra Limited

Aug 25, 2022

Good load balancing and web proxy features with good attack prevention

The major drawback is it has lot of options nested inside, and each option has a lot of options. I'm not sure who might be using all those options or even some (limited) good options. They should pare everything down. It requires a particular skill or training before being able to manage it. Creating virtual servers, managing pools, and nodes until it is working on WAF side of it becomes difficult while writing the irules. Another drawback is we are using a physical appliance. It becomes very slow and unresponsive. Even logs cannot load on the box to troubleshoot. It overwrites the logs. They need to do something in log storage locally on this box in the next release.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the balancer and you can change policies very easily."

"The initial setup was was easy to install."

"The most valuable features of the F5 Advanced WAF are the enhanced ASM and the performance. Additionally, the usability and effectiveness are very good."

"It protects and mitigates damage in the network."

"F5 Advanced WAF is a stable solution, we are satisfied. It is more stable than ForiWeb."

"The most valuable feature is that it is secure."

"I like them because I like the security solution. They get extra marks compared to other solutions or competitors. There are more features than any other product I can think of. They're always monitoring, and the security features offer more than other, lesser products."

"Identification, ease of use, and ease of modifying it to most of our needs are valuable."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"One of the greatest things about F5 Load Balancer is that it provides additional capability for handling huge workloads and routing them to an SAP or non-SAP application. It is capable of supporting a large amount of user workload and application connectivity workload. This was the main reason why we chose F5."

"What we like best about this solution is its stability. It is extremely stable."

"It has so many features. First of all, it has a full proxy architecture, it has multiple modules. The best feature is the WAF, the web application firewall module. It also has cashing type capabilities. It has all kinds of load-balancing algorithms based on your IT requirements."

"If I were to choose one key feature in particular, perhaps it would be the iRule feature. It’s a really versatile tool."

"In my team, we work in a very agile environment and the solutions from BIG-IP, including BIG-IP WAF, suit us well when developing and serving our applications."

"Initial setup is easy and pretty standard."

"The product is very stable. We put a decent amount of stress on it given our load."

"The initial setup is easy."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pros

Cons

"There should be more ability to rate limit certain scenarios. The majority of the time, it is either on or off. For certain types of use cases, there should be the ability to rate limit, not just enable or disable."

"I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before."

"They should work on the virtualization of NGINX."

"F5 Advanced WAF could improve resource usage, it is CPU intensive. Additionally, adding automated remediation would be a benefit. For example, an easy button alerts us of the events that are occurring, and what we want to do at the time. An automated approach where somebody could be alerted very quickly. Instead of going and reconfiguring everything, an automated approach is what I'm looking at."

"The administrator's user interface and some of the settings can sometimes be very complicated to understand."

"This solution can be made more user-friendly."

"The overall price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve."

"The solution could improve by having an independent capture module. It has a built feature that you can deploy the capture on your published website. However, it's not very user-friendly. When you compare this feature to Google Capture or other enterprise captures, they are very simple. It needs a good connection to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. When you implement this feature in the data center, you may suffer some complications with connecting to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. This should be improved in the future."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"We would like to have integration into encryption and PKI integration with SafeNet. That is probably the key component in using External PKIs, letting people bring their PKIs with them."

"Improvements should enable customers to build a tailor-made solution in the future through a service portal."

"Lacking in free training to help users understand the product more, so they would know how to correctly use it. Like other vendors and their products, becoming more proactive is an area for improvement."

"Technical support is somewhat slow and could be improved."

"I would like to see better integration."

"Needs to provide a visual interface to follow a customer's activity (from client to BIG-IP to SNAT IP to the chosen server, then back). Today, we are still performing packet captures."

"If we decide to migrate to the cloud, I don't think that BIG-IP is a good solution and we probably won't use it."

"The ASM administration is quite complex. The topic itself is pretty complex, so it is not easy to provide a nice, clean interface. There are a lot of references and dependencies in-between the different subareas."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"F5 Advanced WAF is not a cost-effective solution. Although they are attempting to reduce prices with their VE and cloud options, they are more expensive than other solutions. The solution is more expensive on average."

"F5 Advanced WAF technical support comes at a cost, and it's expensive."

"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."

"I think the price is very high."

"The cost is slightly above average."

"There are different licenses available to use F5 Advanced WAF, such as BT, ASM, and LPM."

"There is a perpetual license that comes with your hardware. There is also an additional fee for support."

"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"It is cheaper than the average on the market."

"Check other vendors like Cisco, Citrix or A10 Networks. There are plenty in the market with which you can achieve same thing."

"Though functionality is high, its cost can be considered slightly higher than its competitors."

"There are additional costs depending on what modules or what functionality is required."

"It is quite expensive as a product. Because it is very stable, it is also expensive."

"The pricing is inclusive of many features."

"It could be priced a little less, especially on the virtual side. It gets a bit expensive, but you get what you pay."

"It's not a cheap product, but there are no other replacements for what we do with it."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about F5 Advanced WAF?

It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the rules per the requirements.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?

The product is not so expensive. It depends on the assets.

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

The self-service aspect could be improved. The user interface (UI) also seems a bit outdated. Making it more user-friendly would be beneficial.

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 BIG-IP?

The support from F5 BIG-IP LTM is good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 BIG-IP?

There are a few licensing options available for F5 BIG-IP LTM. You can have a perpetual license which is a lifetime license. You then only need to renew the support, if you choose to open a ticket ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP?

The pricing must be more flexible. We get billed for firewalls based on the usage. It will be helpful if the solution provides such flexibility.

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 19% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 16% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 14% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 12% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 5% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Citrix NetScaler vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 17% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 10% of the time

NGINX Plus vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 6% of the time

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 5% of the time

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

June 2024

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

June 2024

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report

Download F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) product report

Also Known As

No data available

F5 BIG-IP, BIG-IP LTM, F5 ASM, Viprion, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , Crescendo Networks Application Delivery Controller, BIG IP

Learn More

Overview

F5 Advanced WAF is a web application security solution for financial and government sectors, e-commerce, and public-facing websites. It offers protection against various attacks, including botnets, web scraping, and foreign entities. The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and is often used with other security tools. Its most valuable features include DDoS and DNS attack protection, SSL uploading, anomaly detection, and the ability to input custom rules.

F5 Advanced WAF has helped organizations to expose more services to the public while providing an extra layer of protection, preventing revenue loss, and securing connectivity.

F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.

BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.

Sample Customers

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank

Riken, TransUnion, Tepco Systems Administration, Daejeon University, G&T Bank, Danamon, CyberAgent Inc.

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

September 2020

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and other solutions. Updated: September 2020.

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787,817 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report.

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